stepping out 🦄

image from BuddhaDoodles.com

Stepping out again.  I asked myself ‘what are the first steps?’  I then realised I’m always doing them.  They may be baby steps, or even invisible at times.  It’s easy to overlook what we do.

I cemented my intention a long time ago.  Maybe during my journey through the canal…  my first encounter of a deeply threatening kind.  The walls were so close (or so they seemed)… so unbending I thought.  There was a split second when I considered aborting the mission.  Just for a second… then I said to myself ‘if I can get through this, I can get through anything’.

Our mental state, our sense of safety and trust… support and holding is so enormously important; critical you could say. Especially when involved with the massively transformational journey of birth.

I ‘went back’… to my passage through the birth canal.  It was the day or day after I had my first big ‘crash’ (what I call them)… this one diagnosed as an adjustment disorder. More commonly know as a nervous breakdown.  That sensitive gene obviously inhabiting my family DNA.

It manifested in my Mother’s sister… after the breakdown of her marriage to her philandering red headed extroverted husband.  Resulting in her hitting the booze… replacing food with that frothy amber ale. My Mother’s side is of Irish descent.

It was around 1960.  The process during these times meant anyone who experienced a ‘nervous breakdown’ was put into an asylum ~ a mental hospital. Especially if they were a woman.

She was 42yrs old.  She was fully conscious of where she was and what was going on.  She surmised (trusting the establishment🙁) that as she’d been placed in a psyche hospital she must be ‘mad’.

She quickly began fretting…  expressing out loud her shame and fear and concern that these ‘mad’ genes would be passed on to her children.  She was deeply despondent. Not long after being admitted to the hospital she fell prey to pneumonia and died shortly after.

I clearly remember the night we visited her… just after she’d been admitted.  The scene of that night is painted clearly in my memory store.  It was night time and it was a Full Moon.  We needed to walk through these dark shadowy gardens to get to the main building.  I remember everything  being so dark.  And piercing the air around us were patients howls and screams.  Truly!  Just like a scene from a scary movie.

I was only young.  Maybe twelve or thirteen.  And as we walked into the ward and approached Eileen’s bed… I quickly absorbed the scene.  I could see what was going on.

In my head I said to myself… ‘she’s not mad, she just needs some good nutritional food.’  It was super clear to me.

She died two weeks later believing she was mad.

Somethings have changed since 1960, but no where near enough.

Much love ~ marilyn💚🧚‍♂️💚 (Healing Happens❤️)